Compare Urban Life Around the Globe With New Side-by-Side City Maps

Photo: Urban Observatory

More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and that proportion is increasing. The United Nations predicts that 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. Understanding what works and what doesn’t work in these densely populated environments is a more urgent now than ever.

A new exhibit and website launched this week hopes to help by providing a way to directly compare cities head to head on a variety of factors, including demographics, land use, and transportation.

The Urban Observatory is a collaboration between Esri, the geospatial software giant; the transmedia company Radical Media*; and Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED and other highbrow conferences. A physical exhibit, featuring an array of HD screens arrayed in a semicircle (see photo above), was unveiled this week at Esri’s user conference in San Diego, but you can play around with it on your own on the website.

Image: Urban Observatory

The project sprang from a keynote speech Wurman gave at the Esri conference in 2010, in which he proposed studying 19 cities that will reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century. That idea became the seed for Wurman’s 19.20.21 project, and the goal of the new Urban Observatory is to extend this type of comparative analysis to lots more cities.

“There seems to be an upwelling of people thinking up ideas for cities, but they don’t understand other cities,” Wurman told me in an interview last week. “They can’t make use of the successes and failures of other places.” What’s needed, he says, is a way to compare cities side-by-side at the same scale.

With the Urban Observatory, you could easily kill a few hours doing just that. An easy and intuitive navigation system lets you compare population density in Tokyo and New York or average road speeds in London, Los Angeles, and Rio de Janeiro.

Click a button to zoom in or out, and the cities you’ve selected change scale simultaneously. Or that’s the idea — at present, European cities seem to scale differently than the rest.

So far the observatory contains 16 cities that have voluntarily submitted data. There are gaps because not all cities submitted data in every category or at the same resolution. But Wurman is hoping more cities will participate as word of the project spreads. Ultimately, he’d like to see it include 100 cities, as well as data on more facets of urban life, such as crime, environmental quality, electricity and water supplies, and access to open space.

“It’s whatever we decide to put in it,” he said. “It’s an open-ended thing.”

In addition to being interesting to play around with, the observatory could also be a boon to businesses, Wurman says. A car company looking to open a new factory, for example, could use it to compare the age, population, and education level of its prospective work force, or assess how long workers’ commute times would be for different locations.

Perhaps it could also be a tool for social change.

Wurman would like to see the observatory include information on the availability of health care, for example, or the typical length of maternity leave granted in different places.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a source of comparing that kind of information around the world?” Wurman said. “It would keep the world more honest as we go global.”